Essays

Second Prize, 2017 Literal Latte Essay Award.
“Write about what you know,” my journalism teacher, Mrs. Orsini admonished. What did she mean by that? It was rather like being told, “Work for a living!” At fourteen such exhortations were meaningless. I stared, both fascinated and repelled, at Mrs. Orsini’s long painted toenails. She was married to a podiatrist, she had told us girls. Why would anyone choose that field? What induced her to marry such a man?

Third Prize, 2017 Literal Latte Essay Award.
I’m not an expert on brain injury. I am a person who has one. It was an accident — the accident of a drunk with a truck. It was a Code 4 emergency, which means my life was threatened. Then it wasn’t my life. My head hit the headrest so hard it broke the seat. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage….

First Prize, 2017 Literal Latte Essay Award.
By June, the weather is already so sweltering, the very concept of summer feels oppressive. As I park beneath a giant walnut tree at Abington Friends School and walk Gus and Grace across the parking lot for the last time as second graders, the mixture of sadness and happiness that accompanies every end and beginning of the school year as a parent engulfs me. I breathe in the soupy air and count. Based on the estimated start date Detective Brody gave me, I will start the Philadelphia Police Academy in ten weeks….

Fiction

Third Prize, 2018 Literal Latte Fiction Award.
That winter, on our island, a flu arrived by fishing trawler; it was carried up the stairs of a cottage not far from our own on the hands of a visiting uncle, and soon all the Tillett daughters caught it: their faces flushed with fever, their lungs filling with fluid….

Second Prize, 2018 Literal Latte Fiction Award.
At five a.m. they heard a crash like a house had fallen from the sky, so Marty told Maria, “We’re fine, everything’s fine.” He fought to untangle his feet and find the floor and get down the hall to their five year-old son…

First Prize, 2018 Literal Latte Fiction Award.
Fifty-year-olds don’t climb trees. They don’t trespass either, although it was a question whether I was actually trespassing. Hadn’t I gone to school here? Wasn’t this my church once, back when I believed in churches? I grasped the forked branch above me and used it to drag myself a few more inches along the rough limb I was straddling. A little closer to the sky. A little closer to the past….

Winner, 2018 Literal Latte Short Short Contest.
No one talked about the difficulty of the first transition because no one could talk at that time. We weren’t even apes. Barely sentient beings. Un-cognizant of our own evolution happening. A leaf pushed in the wind. Twigs swept on the stream. We simply became, suddenly.

Second Prize, 2018 Literal Latte Fiction Award.
Balanced half on a battered metal rung, half on the front of the stone-faced building, the young man stretched to touch the letters of the sign, and then down behind them. He felt for wires and fittings that once supplied the electricity, making them glow, a beacon in the dark, inviting the neighborhood to watch stories by the light of their artificial fires. “Blockbuster,” it still spelled, in dull yellow and faded blue…

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The views expressed in Literal Latté are not necessarily those of its editors or owners. Indexed by Index of American Periodical Verse. ISSN: 1084-3957